Alpha Centauri Alien Crossfire PBEM

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Having become re-hooked on Sid Mieir's Alpha Centauri, I was wondering if anybody would be interested in trying a game of Play By Email. It's built into Alien Crossfire, though I haven't used it before. If someone would be interested, drop me a PM or sound off below!

Ha, a bunch of us here tried to play this about eight years ago. It didn't take long for reality to set in: a full game of SMAC needs hundreds of turns, each of which requires one move per player, which means thousands of laborious email attachments in all. Even if each player sends out out a move per day (an optimistic rate), you'll still need a week per turn, and you won't finish for years to come.

Best of luck to you bunch, though. I suggest you post your progress updates here in-character, as we did. After all, you'll need to do something fun while everyone else is moving.

The market has much to answer for as to why gaming is NOT an art. -- illum

Ha, a bunch of us here tried to play this about eight years ago. It didn't take long for reality to set in: a full game of SMAC needs hundreds of turns, each of which requires one move per player, which means thousands of laborious email attachments in all. Even if each player sends out out a move per day (an optimistic rate), you'll still need a week per turn, and you won't finish for years to come.

Best of luck to you bunch, though. I suggest you post your progress updates here in-character, as we did. After all, you'll need to do something fun while everyone else is moving. :-)

Finishing a match or not never bothers me. For me the journey is the fun.

If anyone is playing on the Mac and wants to use their numpad to move units around, I put together a fix last night. The problem is that the game treats the numpad just as numbers and instead uses the arrow keys + Home/End and PgUp/PgDn as the movement keys. Turns out Wineskin has support for a custom xmodmap configuration. So, what you need to do is open up X11 (/Applications/Utilities for me). In the terminal, type:

xmodmap -pke > ~/Xmodmap

That will create a file, 'Xmodmap', in your home directory. Open it up in a text editor and alter the configuration to fit your needs. For me, I changed this section:

Save the file and move it to the /Contents/Frameworks directory inside of the SMAC app. For me this is /Applications/Alpha Centauri Alien Crossfire.app/Contents/Frameworks. Rename the file to '.Xmodmap' (without quotes) and you should be good to go. Start the game up and the numpad now works like it should.

If anyone is playing on the Mac and wants to use their numpad to move units around, I put together a fix last night. The problem is that the game treats the numpad just as numbers and instead uses the arrow keys + Home/End and PgUp/PgDn as the movement keys. Turns out Wineskin has support for a custom xmodmap configuration. So, what you need to do is open up X11 (/Applications/Utilities for me). In the terminal, type:

xmodmap -pke > ~/Xmodmap

That will create a file, 'Xmodmap', in your home directory. Open it up in a text editor and alter the configuration to fit your needs. For me, I changed this section:

Save the file and move it to the /Contents/Frameworks directory inside of the SMAC app. For me this is /Applications/Alpha Centauri Alien Crossfire.app/Contents/Frameworks. Rename the file to '.Xmodmap' (without quotes) and you should be good to go. Start the game up and the numpad now works like it should.

Also, holy sh*t that's cool - thanks! I've clipped that for future reference. I'm playing on a MBP with a wireless keyboard, so no numpad, but that could change. Cheers